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Warning: Contains spoilers

1. The Department of Synchronicity says: A South Korean student opens fire and kills 32 people at the Virginia Tech campus. (When you first heard that it was an Asian student, did you say to yourself, Please don’t be Filipino?) Meanwhile the movie Shooter, starring Mark Wahlberg as an ex-military sniper, opens in Manila.

2. Shooter is so wrong-headed that it actually advocates killing corrupt public officials. Its solution to abuse of power: Just kill them.

3. Mark’s character is sort of like the Unabomber, with Special Forces training instead of a mathematics background. As far as I’m concerned the direst section of the movie is the one where he’s wearing a plaid shirt and a pony tail. It lasts ten minutes, then he recovers his senses.

4. Ned Beatty’s evil Senator is obviously Dick Cheney. I kept expecting him to spray his hunting buddies with buckshot.

5. Shooter is an anagram of Hooters. Don’t you love it when an underwear model turns out to have real acting talent? Warms the cockles of my vestigial heart. It’s a good thing Mark takes his shirt off in this movie, or it would be a complete waste of time. In fact I started wishing he would get shot, so he would take it off again.

6. This is not the way to follow that brilliant performance in The Departed.

7. The movie is based on Point of Impact, a thriller written by Stephen Hunter, the Washington Post movie critic. I wonder what he thought of it.

8. There’s an interesting story in there, about America’s gun culture. The movie doesn’t do anything with it.

9. Mark Wahlberg shows up at your door with a bullethole in his chest and asks you to stitch him up. Discuss. (Oh no! I can’t sew!)